This semester Sensorium will be hosting a weekly Winter Lunchtime Seminar Series in the Sensorium Research Loft! These events are meant to foster interconnectivity between faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars and artists within the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. This casual, lunch time seminar series will host a variety of graduate student presentations, faculty presentations and pitch sessions, open luncheons, topical discussions, invited speakers and external associations or organizations looking to interface with our community and share their work. The sessions will be a platform for faculty and students to share their research and to hear from each other, as well as for faculty members to pitch collaborative opportunities and job prospects, in addition to general information sessions about Sensorium and the community. All Sensorium associated graduate students and faculty members will be given the opportunity to present at these weekly sessions.

Please join us Wednesday, January 15th from 11:30am-12:30pm for our first event in the series, a drop-in lunch in the Sensorium Research Loft (4th Floor CFA, Room M333). Graduate students, faculty and staff are welcome to attend, light lunch, coffee and snacks will be served.

The Sensorium Research Loft is wheelchair accessible, for full access details please email sensloft@yorku.ca.

Writing Groups will continue throughout the Winter semester in the Sensorium Research Loft (4th Floor CFA, Room M333). The General Writing Group is open to all graduate students and will take place Mondays from 11:30am-2:30pm. The Dissertation Writing Group is open to graduate students currently working on dissertations or long term writing projects and will take place Thursdays or Fridays from 12:00-3:00pm. Dissertation Writing Group participants are asked to tentatively commit to the current five week writing group duration. If you have any questions about the Sensorium Writing Groups please email Signy Lynch at signy.lynch@gmail.com.

Sensorium is looking forward to participating in the Organized Research Units Open House taking place Wednesday, January 29th from 10:00am-2:00pm in the Scott Library Collaboratory. Be sure to stop by the Open House to learn about the amazing work being done by Organized Research Units at York University!

Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell define the “videographic essay” as a new form of scholarly and pedagogical practice that “conducts analysis and conveys arguments in a multimedia form about multimedia objects of study” through digital technologies. Working alongside scholars like Catherine Grant and buttressed by scholarly apparatuses like the peer-reviewed journal [in Transition, videographic criticism is an important intervention into the discipline of cinema & media studies in relation to its traditions of both cinephilia and critical media analysis. The presentation will examine a) how it reflects the legacy of the avant-garde as an animating spirit of the discipline and b) its potential and challenge as a pedagogical tool. • Michael Zryd is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Cinema and Media Arts, and also Graduate Program Director for the MA & PhD in Cinema & Media Studies, Graduate Program in Film at York University. Zryd attended the Middlebury College Seminar on Videographic Criticism in June 2019 with support from the Academic Innovation Fund at York.

The Anishinaabeg, as Indigenous peoples under settler colonial occupation, have undergone a world-ending apocalypse. Anishinaabe cultural production of these times is invested in remaking a world in which Anishinaabe people can live fully and free. This has been referred to more broadly as an Indigenous renaissance, a resurgence, a reclamation. This presentation will examine how Anishinaabe people are simultaneously watching, making, theorizing, and acting upon a desire for political and social change through film. Anishinaabe cinephilia looks to the choreography of the muskrat whose gestures towards futurity began the rebuilding of the world with what could be held in a tiny hand. • Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, installation, textiles and social practice. Susan is co-founder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemlwin. Currently a PhD student in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), Susan joined OCAD University as Delaney Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies in August 2019.

Elena Gorfinkel’s recent manifesto “Against Lists,” published online at the feminist film journal Another Gaze, has caused a stir in film culture. This presentation will take up issues raised by Gorfinkel’s intervention, including the deleterious effects of lists, as well as their role in canon-making. The aim of the presentation will be to spark a spirited discussion. • Girish Shambu teaches courses on sustainability and supply chains at Canisius College in Buffalo. He is also a film blogger, scholar, and critic who edits Film Quarterly ’s online column, Quorum. He is the author of The New Cinephilia (Caboose Books, 2014), and two recent pieces on film culture, “Time’s Up for the Male Canon” and the manifesto “For a New Cinephilia,” both in Film Quarterly.

If you have an announcement or are planning an event, let us know and we’ll include it in the next newsletter. Please send your information to <sensinfo@yorku.ca>.